


mayden, maskelez under mone

by falseknightontheroad



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Medieval, F/F, F/M, Inspired by Perle | Pearl (poem), Inspired by かぐや姫の物語 | Kaguya-hime no Monogatari | The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013), Many listed characters play fairly minor roles, Period-Typical Underage, Possibly ameliorated by the reader's interpretation of the Pearl poem but overall unhappy, Spoilers inherent in choice of source material, Unhappy Ending, in terms of the age where it's deemed acceptable to start throwing around marriage proposals, thematic holytalia resonances prepare to die edition
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:28:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 11,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24863074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/falseknightontheroad/pseuds/falseknightontheroad
Summary: Go round, come round, come round, o distant timeCome round, call back my heartBirds, bugs, beastsGrass, trees, flowersTeach me how to feelIf I hear that you pine for meI will return to you.—“Tennyo no uta”/“Celestial maiden’s song,” Isao Takahata & Riko SakaguchiOnce upon a time, on a moonlit night, a poor and childless woodcutter found a miniature girl in the bole of a cornel tree.
Relationships: Female Germany & Female North Italy (Hetalia), Female Germany/Female North Italy (Hetalia), Hungary/Prussia (Hetalia)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> _The Tale of the Princess Kaguya_ (dir. Isao Takahata, 2013) is an animated film from Studio Ghibli based on ”The Tale of the Bamboo-Cutter,” or “ _Taketori monogatari_ ,” one of the oldest extant works of Japanese prose fiction. The film is on Netflix (at least it is in the UK; otherwise, try Amazon or iTunes, or absolutely DON’T (cough, cough, wink) attempt TORRENTING) and I highly recommend it—it is a beautifully realized rendering of the story that adds a lot of depth, and the animation is stunning. The story can be read in translation [here](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Japanese_Fairy_Book/The_Bamboo-Cutter_and_the_Moon-Child) ( _The Japanese Fairy Book_ , Iwaya Sazanami, tr. Yei Theodora Ozaki, 1906) and [here](http://www.mission.net/japan/kobe/KaguyaHime.pdf) ( _The Moon Princess_ , Tetsuo Kawamoto, tr. Clarence Calkins, 1994).
> 
> “Pearl” ( _Perle_ in the original text) is a Middle English (late 14th century) elegiac/theological/allegorical poem, assumed to be by the same author responsible for _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_. It is weird and wistful and incredibly beautifully structured, and (given a flexible definition of English) one of my favorite English-language poems ever. It can be read in the original, with literal and verse translations by William Stanton, [here](http://www.billstanton.co.uk/pearl/menu.htm). (I prefer Marie Borroff’s translation, which is not available online—if you are moved to seek it out, her _The Gawain Poet: Complete Works_ runs for under $10 used, and in addition to “Pearl” you get _Gawain_ plus three other shortish poems and a lot of handy notes as well. Or, her _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Patience; Pearl: Verse Translations_ is fairly widespread in university, and some larger public, libraries; find the nearest copy [here](https://www.worldcat.org/title/sir-gawain-and-the-green-knight-patience-and-pearl-verse-translations/oclc/1011778433). whenever they’re open again lolsob)
> 
> The Gawain Poet had most likely never heard of Japan at all, and I highly doubt that Isao Takahata has ever read “Pearl”. Nevertheless, there are some pretty strong thematic similarities, all of which are spoilers.
> 
> The title is adapted from “Pearl”; the song in the summary was composed for _Princess Kaguya_.
> 
> On names: I don’t really like a lot of the common Nyotalia suggestions, and also my brain is broken in a specific way that makes it really hard for me to do anything if character names feel ahistorical (fun fact, Monika is technically plausible, as veneration of St. Monica of Hippo, d. 387, was fairly widespread by the mid-1400s, but it’s got a bit of the Tiffany Problem of being strictly possible but just kind of looking weird). So: fem!Germany is Mathilde, fem!Veneziano is Tiziana, fem!Romano is Clementina, and fem!Austria is Amalie. Everyone else has their canon names; Netherlands is Tims, Belgium is Lieve, Luxembourg is Pier (or Sir Barely-Appearing-In-This-Film), Liechtenstein is Adelheid. They’re mentioned so briefly I didn’t tag them, but Rome is Aurelio, Seborga is Carlo, and Beatrice is made up. Anyone who guesses why I picked ‘Beatrice’ wins the ‘paid attention in AP Euro’ prize. Everyone else named is a human OC. Speaking of ahistorical, this is set in (waves arms around) medieval-fairy tale-pastiche-land, call it the fantasy 1400s?

_Once, long ago_ , deep in the mountains, there lived a woodcutter and his wife. They were quite poor, as woodcutters usually are, although they made the best of it, and what is more, they had no children. The woodcutter, whose name was Gilbert, would make light of it, claiming that children were noisy, messy, and rude, and would only be an inconvenience to them; his wife, Erzsébet, would answer back in equal spirit that Gilbert was already noisy, messy, and rude enough that any more contributions of the sort to their household would drive her into the woods to live out her days as a hermit, so it was all for the best. They had even almost convinced themselves of this.

Each day, Gilbert would go out and tend to the coppices, taking the wood which he judged ready for any of its uses and keeping an eye out for the villagers’ pigs, in case any had fallen upon some misfortune during their pannage. It was labor by turns tedious, backbreaking, and tedious _and_ backbreaking; while not strictly unchanging, the woods had become to Gilbert a largely predictable accumulation of cycles. All the stranger, then, that it was in those woods that Gilbert was the first to become party to that rarest of things: the genuine miracle.

It happened like this.

Back loaded with bundles of withies, Gilbert made his way home through the grey-blue of the gathering dusk. His breath hung in clouds in the air, and above him, above the black tops of the bare trees, the old moon hung in the new moon’s arms. His shoes crunched against the frozen ground. Gilbert stopped to chafe his hands together, and as he looked up from the task, the forest ahead was filled with soft, cool light, unlike any he had seen made by man.

“What?” He whispered to himself, cautiously stepping closer. He could see, now, that the light came from a tree, a weathered cornel cherry filled with a pale radiance that transformed its few, unseasonably early yellow blossoms into little ghostly clouds. Its blossoms that, as Gilbert watched, multiplied before his eyes—he stumbled backwards, half-raising one arm in self-defense, against what he was not sure.

The light brightened, danced briefly on the edge of unbearable, and then dimmed to almost nothing, to something that Gilbert could have dismissed as a trick of the moonlight if it had been full. He lowered his arm and moved closer in a half-crouch, pointing his axe haft-first at the tree, and cautiously prodded at it.

The tree gave a crack like river ice breaking, and Gilbert would never admit, throughout the rest of his life, that he shrieked and jumped backward. Its trunk opened at about his eye level, layers of bark and living wood peeling back, revealing a hollow filled with light, spilling out around the form of—Gilbert rubbed his eyes, squinting against the again-dying glare as he approached again. The form of a girl, no larger than his hand.

He swallowed. This was doubtless some saintly apparition. Gilbert cast his mind back, trying to remember if he’d done anything especially worthy (Gilbert often insisted, to Erzsébet and to anyone else that would listen, that it wasn’t the sin of pride if he was just telling the truth about himself; but virtue deserving of a divine vision was, he knew, just a touch beyond him all the same.) The girl wore all white, a houppelande of rich, silvery white, trimmed with white fur and embroidered along the sleeves and collar with dark blue-green thread interspersed with pearls, that spread out from where she knelt in the hollow of the tree. Her filet was the same blue-green as the embroidery, fixing the translucent white veil that half-covered the blonde braids framing her clear, grave face. She didn’t move or speak. For all the world, she might have been carved from the tree itself, except that Gilbert could see the flush of life in her cheeks.

Setting down the axe and slinging his load of branches from his back, Gilbert cautiously went to his knees. He licked his dry lips and said, “Er. Your…your holiness?”

The girl didn’t stir. The light around her was ebbing now.

“Who _are_ you?” He asked.

For a long moment, she remained motionless, and then she opened her eyes, the grey-blue of the sky above them.

“Is there—is there something you’re supposed to tell me?” Gilbert asked, voice nearly a whisper. He couldn’t bring himself to muster even an ounce of his customary half-joking vanity. Whatever drove this royally-dressed apparition to come to him, he couldn’t imagine, and he couldn’t help a little fear.

The girl smiled the tiny half-smile of a sculpture and then slumped to the side, eyes closing. The light had gone almost entirely, now reduced to a faint glow limning the hollow in the tree. The woods were utterly silent around them.

Gilbert shuffled forwards on his knees, paused, was not struck down with heavenly lightning, and then pushed himself back up into a wary half-crouch. _I can’t just leave her here_ , he thought. He looked doubtfully at his lumpy knit mittens and dusted them off as best he could on the front of his chaperon. Bracing himself for another bolt that was no more forthcoming, he reached out and scooped her from the bole of the tree, as carefully and delicately as he would handle a nestling. Gilbert didn’t dare breathe. He imagined his heart beat so loudly they could hear it in the village.

He stared down at the girl cupped in his palms. “Who are you?” He mouthed, and received no more answer than he had before. She simply turned to one side, as if—as if making herself comfortable. _What are you_ , he thought, might be as good a question. All Gilbert knew was that she was very, very small, and dressed in the richest clothing he had ever seen, and she looked at complete peace in his hands. Curled up, like a sleeper. Gilbert thought again of a nestling, of something tiny and completely itself and infinitely fragile, and. And realized.

“Is that what this is?” He burst out. “I’m—we’re—supposed to take care of you?”

There was no answer, from her or from the woods, but inside of himself Gilbert felt a resounding, expanding _yes_ ness taking root. He laughed, disbelieving, and then clapped his mouth shut. She didn’t wake, and Gilbert didn’t bother trying to pick back up the axe or the branches but hurried, taking all the care he could not to jostle her, towards home.

He shouldered the cottage door open, startling Erzsébet from the fire, and hissed “Look—Bet, Bet, _look_ at this—”

Erzsébet, who had certain expectations of Gilbert when he came home in this manner, said “Gil, if it’s another bird…” She trailed off at his wild-eyed expression.

“No,” he said, thrusting his hands towards her. “ _Look_ , for God’s sake, I just, I just _found_ her out there…”

She hurried over to him and peered into his hands. “Oh, my goodness,” she said faintly. The girl moved faintly and pressed her cheek deeper into one mitten, and Erzsébet gasped, covering her mouth. “What…what is it?”

“She. And I don’t—I don’t know, but I think, I think some sort of miracle. She was in a tree, Bet, and it was all glowing, and then it opened up and she was in it and she looked at me.” Gilbert stared at Erzsébet, his face nakedly pleading. “And I think we’re supposed to take care of her.”

Erzsébet raised her eyebrows.

“What? What else was I supposed to think?”

She shook her head. “Nothing, it’s just that…well, look how she’s dressed. We’re supposed to do better for her than that?”

“Bet, I don’t think miracles exactly come all wrapped up in sackcloth.”

“No, but you’re certainly not supposed to dress them in it afterwards.” Erzsébet sucked her cheek. “You’re sure?”

Gilbert nodded. He couldn’t think how to explain what he had felt in the forest, holding the girl. “I’m sure.”

Erzsébet held out her hands. Gilbert recoiled a little before he could stop himself. “You said _we_ , Gil,” she chided him. “Let me see her.”

He carefully placed the girl in her hands.

“Hel _lo_ ,” Erzsébet cooed. “Aren’t you the pretty one— _oop_!”

Gilbert, who had gone to finally shut the cottage door, wheeled around, the _You already dropped her?!_ forming on his lips, but instead he saw Erzsébet struggling to contain something in her hands, and the little flurry of tiny clothing, and what she was trying to hold grew larger and larger until she staggered backwards with a surprised cry, holding at arm’s length—Gilbert’s mouth fell open—an infant.

He hurried towards her, not sure what he was planning to do once he got there. The infant’s face, meantime, screwed up, and by the time Gilbert was standing by Erzsébet their cottage had filled with the last sound either of them had come to expect: newborn wailing.

“What do I—” Erzsébet was rooted to the spot, staring at the wriggling baby with eyes so wide Gilbert could see the whites.

“I don’t know, wrap her in something?”

She blinked and then yanked off her apron, swaddling the infant, beginning to talk the way Erzsébet generally did when she was anxious: “Oh, well, you didn’t like being held like that, did you—there, all right, shhh, isn’t that better? I’ll bet it is.” The wailing quieted. “That’s right, there you go.” Erzsébet took a deep breath, glancing down at the baby in her arms, then to Gilbert. “Get me my chaperon,” she said. “Magda the brewer’s got a three-month-old.”

Gilbert, still stunned by the sudden appearance of a baby, fetched the cloak and hood for her, and they were already out the door by the time he stopped and said, “Wait. Why’re we leaving the house?”

Erzsébet stared at him. “Because we’re going to see Magda?”

“But we’ve got what to drink at home—”

“Because,” Erzsébet said slowly, “Magda’s nursing.”

Gilbert paused. “Oh.”

Erzsébet smiled. “Come on, blockhead,” she said, not without affection. “Keep the wolves off me.”

They made their way further down the path to the village, moving quickly—it was fairly dark—and this time Erzsébet stopped dead.

“What?” Gilbert asked. “What is it?”

“I—” Even dark as it was, he could see the strange expression on Erzsébet’s face. She blinked, and then grimaced, and then shifted the baby to one side under her chaperon and reached up beneath it, undoing her kirtle.

“Bet—” Gilbert couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Erzsébet shifted her grip again on the baby, carefully guiding her to latch on to the offered nipple. She looked up at Gilbert. “You were saying, earlier, about miracles?”

Gilbert swallowed and then nodded. “If _that’s_ not a sign, I don’t know what is.”

They sat side by side on the floor in front of the fire in their cottage, looking at the baby in Erzsébet’s lap, still swaddled in her apron. Gilbert reached out with one finger; the baby grabbed it and began gumming it.

“We’ll have to get her christened once Father Konrad’s doing the rounds again,” Gilbert murmured. “Bet, what’ll we tell him—”

“That God finally graced us with a child,” she said. “He doesn’t need to know exactly how.”

“What’ll we tell everyone in the village? They know you weren’t pregnant.”

Erzsébet shrugged. “That I didn’t know I was either?”

“If you think they’ll believe it.”

“They don’t have to believe it,” Erzsébet said with finality. “They just have to act like they do.”

Gilbert managed to extricate his finger.

“…Maybe we should tell Father Konrad,” she said. “About, you know, how you found her? I mean, there’s ‘God graced us with a child, hooray,’ and there’s ‘Gilbert found her in the woods dressed like a princess and shaped like a miniature person and all glowing and then she transformed into a baby.’ Maybe he’ll have some advice.” Erzsébet leaned her head on his shoulder. “But you know the Father. I’m pretty sure all he knows about any kind of baby is not to hold them underwater too long.”

Gilbert snorted. “He’s a holy man, Bet, watch your mouth!”

She laughed, and they both fell silent a while longer.

“Do you want to know what I think?” Gilbert said slowly. Erzsébet nodded. “I think…when I found her, it was like…like a prophecy. Like I was seeing what she’s going to be.”

“What, five inches tall?”

“No!” He elbowed her gently. “I mean…royal.”

Erzsébet hummed, stroking the baby’s head. “With us for her parents?”

“After everything else, is that so hard to believe?”

“…No,” Erzsébet admitted.

Gilbert had been the youngest of his own family, and although Erzsébet had done her turns with familial and communal child-minding as a girl it had been many years since she had been asked to spend any length of time with an infant, and so the next morning they hurried into the village to beg advice from Magda, whose three-month-old Anna was the most recent of eight. The story they told her—that Gilbert had found this baby in the woods, and then Erzsébet’s milk had come when it cried, a sign from God if ever there was one—was all over the village by that afternoon, and it was the one they told Father Konrad at the christening the next month.

By that time, the baby was growing a soft cap of blonde hair.

Though she was found on Saint Margaret’s day, and though Gilbert and Erzsébet had both become used by that point to calling her Princess, it was Saint Matilda’s day on the christening, and so they named her Mathilde. It was a good name, they thought. Strong. Royal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes:  
> \--a houppelande is a 15th-century overdress. See [here](https://www.rosaliegilbert.com/clothesandaccessories.html) for medieval women’s clothing vocab and pictures. A chaperon is a sort of hood/capelet combo.  
> \--the feast day of St. Margaret of Hungary is Jan. 18, which is a bit early for cornel cherries to flower; the feast day of St. Mechtild (Matilda) of Hackeborn was formerly Feb. 26 or 27, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, though currently it's Nov. 19. “Margaret” means “pearl”, so I wanted to include her in there. Matilda and its variants Mathilde and Mechtild(e) were fairly common noblewomen’s names.  
> 


	2. Chapter 2

Mathilde grew, grew like a vine; by the time the cornel trees had fruited she was pulling herself up, over and over, on Gilbert and Erzsébet’s legs, and the two of them jokingly called her Princess Bindweed and Princess Underfoot. She seemed endlessly fascinated with the ground, Gilbert forever having to drop his baskets or Erzsébet her hoe to make Mathilde spit out whatever she had just put into her mouth. She didn’t make sound often, but she had managed in those months what Erzsébet never had in years: Mathilde had made Gilbert _stop_ singing, bawling whenever she heard his harsh, squawking voice start on whatever he’d picked up most recently at Magda’s. Erzsébet called it more proof of her miraculous nature. Gilbert called it tasteless.

People came by, that year; they always did, for neither Erzsébet nor Gilbert was friendless, and the rest of the village had as much need of wood and baskets as they did of what the rest could provide. Young Yekateryna visited more days than she didn’t, her little half-siblings clinging to her skirts and gawking at Mathilde in the cradle while Yekateryna and Erzsébet chatted. When the cooper came by, his son Tims and daughter Lieve tagged along with their baby brother Pier on Lieve’s back. Clementina and Tiziana, a couple of the younger daughters of the astonishingly prolific Vargas family (Aurelio and Beatrice _seemed_ to have stopped after Carlo, but…) were forever poking their heads in, and sometimes Gilbert would pretend to chase them off with a stick, shouting “Have you no home to go to?” while Tiziana shrieked with laughter and Clementina tried to trip him.

Nobody could say which of them did it first, but as the new year turned (Gilbert swore up and down he saw Mathilde grow during Christmas mass) the children who came by their cottage, or saw them in the village, began calling Mathilde “bean-sprout”. Not that it wasn’t apt, Gilbert and Erzsébet had to admit: she was walking so soon already, after a fashion, and furthermore had fairly long limbs for a child of her size, but, still. “It’s not _dignified_ ,” Gilbert muttered of a night.

Erzsébet raised her eyebrows. “You’re one to talk. Besides, she’s a baby, Gil. Even the royal ones still run around naked and snotty.”

“Everyone still calls them Your Highness, though, I’d bet.” Gilbert reached out and patted Mathilde’s head; the child was sitting on the floor and staring in furious concentration at the little wooden knight Gilbert had rather clumsily carved for her. “If they knew what she was like when I found her, they would too.”

That spring, Gilbert started carrying Mathilde out to the coppices with him, since she chased after him so relentlessly each morning that it was a moot point. He explained each day that she was not to get in her papa’s way while he was using the axe or the knife, and Mathilde nodded gravely, face set in a way that reminded Gilbert half of his own father and half of a fat little monk. She didn’t say anything. Gilbert had gotten used to that, though it worried Erzsébet, who pointed out that Magda’s little Anna was, well, growing _normally_ and babbled almost without stop. But, Gilbert thought, Mathilde would speak when she wanted to, and in the meantime she stared so intently at everyone and everything that it wasn’t a question of whether she understood.

One April evening, Gilbert carried Mathilde home, and on their way Mathilde suddenly shrieked in his ear.

Gilbert cursed loudly, and she did it again, pointing down the path to where someone—either old Jakob or young Jakob, he couldn’t tell from behind—was making his way down ahead of them, old lurcher dog loping at his side. “ _Doggy_!” She yelled, and that was her first word.

Gilbert, ear still ringing, grumbled “Couldn’t have been ‘papa,’ could it?”

She still wasn’t very talkative after that—Mathilde’s second word, as Gilbert tried to coax her into repeating her first to Erzsébet, was “No!”

Like…well, like a bean-sprout, Mathilde continued to grow. By the time Saint Matilda’s day had come and gone again she was of a size with five-year-old Carlo in the village; though far quieter and solemner, she shared his propensity for digging holes and did so all through the cottage garden. “At least she’s not eating everything she digs up now,” Erzsébet said. Instead, Mathilde took the pebbles and bits of root and potshards and snail shells into a corner of the cottage and spent so long arranging them into little formations that Gilbert called her Field Marshal the Princess Mathilde. She dug up an old coin, so worn and discolored that neither Gilbert nor Erzsébet could guess at its origin. Gilbert drilled a hole through it and strung it on a cord for her.

Mathilde liked it in the woods, both the airy, sun-dappled coppices and the thicker, cooler, mustier forest proper. There was always something moving, always something growing, always something different than it had been before. And her father would let her stack withies, and show her which mushrooms were safe to take home for supper and which she should never, ever touch, and tell her the names of the birds like her mother told her the names of plants. Mathilde had decided that what she was going to do when she was older was be the person who knew everything’s name.

While her father’s knife went _snick-snick-snick_ through the willows, Mathilde turned her attention to peeling bark off the fallen birch branch near where he’d left his pack, watching as it came away in long strips to occasionally show a little parade of ants. She piled the bark carefully on top of her father’s pack, and kept a few pieces to crumble in her hands. Her father was still busy, humming over his work, and there was that sound _one_ and the bird-calls from deeper in the thicket _two_ and, _three!_ High-pitched voices, children’s voices, she knew them from the village and from outside her cottage. Mathilde headed towards them to investigate. Her father always told her not to go far, but she _wouldn’t_ and besides he would be able to find her anyway.

She followed the voices, stopping once or twice to kick clumps of leaf mold off her feet. They were always ahead of her, laughing, shouting. Mathilde reached under her shift to pull out the coin and slipped it into her mouth. On all fours, she crept up a short rise, and then saw them below her.

There were five of them, and Mathilde knew their names: Tina and Tizi, Lieve and Tims and baby Pier. Tina and Tims were fighting, maybe, but Tina always sounded angry, so Mathilde couldn’t really tell. She pushed herself over the rise—its other side was steeper than she remembered, and Mathilde skidded down it and, unable to stop, slammed into Tizi.

The other girl rolled easily back to her feet, shaking off leaves. “Oh—hey, it’s _you_ ,” she chirped. Mathilde scrambled backwards, coin still held in her mouth.

The rest of the children had stopped and clustered round them. “Gilbert and Bet’s baby?” Tims asked. Mathilde didn’t know if she liked the face he was making.

“She’s not a baby,” Tizi said evenly. “Look at her, she’s near as big as Carlo.”

“Carlo _is_ a baby,” Tina sniffed, with all the assurance of an elder sister. “You’re stupid, Tiziana, remember they only found her two years ago?”

“ _You’re_ stupid, stupid!”

Mathilde bit down on her coin.

“Found her two years ago, but she got big really fast, didn’t she?” Lieve cut in, and then over her shoulder Pier yelled “Sprout!”

Tizi stopped her shoving match with Tina. “Yeah, she did, ‘cause she’s the bean sprout girl!”

Mathilde finally found her tongue. She spat out the coin and said “I’m not a baby, either.”

That seemed to be enough. Tizi grinned at her and said “We’re gonna go play bandit kings, wanna come with?” Mathilde did not know how to play bandit kings, but nodded anyway.

Dusk was falling and Gilbert didn’t know where Mathilde was.

He’d thought, at first, that she might have gone a little way away to play, but as he’d walked wider and wider circles from his pack with no sign of Mathilde anywhere all he could think of was wolves. Wolves and boars and bears and ravines to fall into and rivers to drown in and the forest, which might have had ghosts or devils but most importantly had _itself_ , its silent mazelike expanse that didn’t care if anyone who went into it came back out, even if they were…

“Mathilde!” He shouted, hands cupped around his mouth. “Princess!”

There was no answer but his voice echoing back from the trees.

Gilbert swung around—he knew she wouldn’t be there but there was still the chance. Nothing. “ _Mathilde_!” He tried again.

The forest ahead of him filled with light.

Fear lanced through his belly and Gilbert sprinted towards the cornel cherry. Mathilde had been taken, he was sure of it, whatever power had put her on Earth had just as easily scooped her away… The light dwindled as quickly as it had sparked, rushing down through the trunk and into the earth. Gilbert took out his axe and tapped frantically with its haft at the tree, searching for the hollow he’d found Mathilde in two (two, just two, _it had only been two years_ ) years before.

As the last of the light faded, the cornel cherry opened its gnarled trunk and disgorged a stream of gold before Gilbert’s wide eyes.

Gilbert and Erzsébet both gave Mathilde the scolding of her life that night for running off without telling her father, but the next day when Tiziana stuck her head around the door and asked if Mathilde could come with them once she’d finished feeding the goat, the answer was yes.

Early that morning, before sunrise, Gilbert had gone back into the woods with several large, empty jars and an odd expression.

The year rolled forward in its course and Mathilde learned that sometimes Clementina acted angry even though she wasn’t, and that the leaves she’d brought home to her mother were called lady’s purse and were good for ear-ache. Her mother started letting her help with the weaving and not just the spinning, and from that it was really very easy to learn how her father made his baskets. When she tried to make her own, they always fell apart; her father said it was because she was just little and her hands weren’t strong enough yet to make the weavers stay tight between the spokes.

Mathilde asked him, once, when they would be, but he wouldn’t answer her and she didn’t know why.

She heard her parents talking that night, once they thought she had gone to sleep, about something her father had dug up in the woods. Mathilde didn’t know why they couldn’t talk to _her_ about it, since she dug things up in the woods all the time and always showed them, and showed her friends too, but she was supposed to be being asleep, so didn’t complain.

“More of it?” Her mother asked. “Again?”

“Yeah. And it…it’s a sign, Bet. It has to be. We should be using it—”

“Gilbert, I’ve already said, we _can’t_. There’d be questions. There’d be too many questions. People would think you’d stolen it.”

“What, from all the fantastically rich people who keep wandering around in the woods?”

“Be serious.”

“I am. I—look at her. Look at her, do you want her to grow up like us? Do you think God wants that?”

“If you think God’s the one giving you this. How do you know it won’t just turn to leaf mold when you try to use it?”

“Won’t know until I try, Bet.”

“Be _serious_ ,” and then they just started whispering to each other too quietly for Mathilde to make out. Usually she liked listening to her parents talk to each other, but something about the way they were doing it now made her feel sort of queasy, and she pulled the blanket over her head and tried to let it pass.


	3. Chapter 3

The next morning, Mathilde wanted to ask them what it had been about, but when she woke up her father was already out, and her mother said it was only boring grown-up things, and then Tiziana came by and Mathilde remembered that she had dug up a root shaped a little like a cat the day before yesterday and wanted to show it to Tiziana, and it was forgotten.

Mathilde _liked_ showing Tiziana things like that. Tims wouldn’t take anything from her, and Lieve would but then she’d drop it and _keep_ dropping it, and Tina would just say it was something Mathilde had found on the ground and what was the big deal, but Tizi would smile and say “Thank you!” and then ask her about it and it made Mathilde want to give her more things even if Tina was mean about them. And Mathilde liked to give Tiziana things because she had a big smile, and knew how to make up extra verses to any song she heard, and always had twigs stuck in her hair.

“It does look sort of like a cat,” Tiziana said when she saw the root. “I bet if you asked your dad he’d carve it, too.” She held it back out towards Mathilde. Mathilde shook her head, and Tiziana slipped the root into the bag she carried tied to her belt.

After they had walked a little longer, Mathilde said “I could give it a face if you wanted.”

Tiziana brightened and answered “Sure!” She kept walking a couple feet, and then turned around to face Mathilde, who had stopped. “You mean now?”

Mathilde nodded and held out one hand for the root, fishing with the other for the little pocketknife her parents had started letting her carry, as long as she promised to be careful. She turned a little to get better sun and stood, holding her coin in her mouth to help herself concentrate, scraping with the knife-tip to get eyes and mouth and whiskers. It was hard; the root was bumpy and tough and the knife kept slipping and when it was done Mathilde thought it looked even less like a cat, which it hadn’t in the first place, it was just some stupid bit of root, but then Tiziana took it back and said “She has a face now, so she has to have a name, and _I_ think she looks like a Giovanna.”

Mathilde put away the knife and tugged at her kirtle. It was getting too short already; her mother had asked why she ever bothered cutting the dresses she borrowed for Mathilde down to size when in another month she’d only have to make them longer again. “Is that what Giovannas look like?”

“When they’re kitties, yeah.”

Mathilde blinked, and then asked, “What do I look like?”

“Oh, that’s easy.” Tiziana grinned. “A bean sprout.”

Late that fall, Mathilde lost her first milk tooth. She knew she’d grow more, and crying was a stupid, baby thing to do, but she did anyway, because what if she _didn’t_ grow any more of them and had to eat just pap the rest of her life? Her father told her not to worry, because all those teeth were already grown and inside her jaw just waiting, but thinking about that made Mathilde feel so crawly and disgusting all up her back that she hid in bed and wouldn’t come out while her parents burned the tooth to keep a witch from getting it.

The next year, Clementina didn’t want to play bandit kings with them anymore; she said it was a stupid game for little kids, and she was almost twelve and wouldn’t have any more of it. Mathilde thought it really was kind of a stupid game, because the rules kept changing every time they played it, but she didn’t want to say so. “Well, what kind of games _do_ you want to play, then?” Lieve asked, and Tims scrunched up his face and said “Kissy ones, I bet,” and Clementina threw dirt at them both and stomped off while Tims laughed and Tiziana made kiss-kiss noises after her.

Mathilde laughed, mostly because Tiziana was laughing. “Why would anyone want to play that?” She asked.

Tiziana shrugged. “Dunno. People get stupid when they’re older. All our brothers and sisters did. Anyway! I call being bandit king first!” And then Mathilde ended up being the rich noble riding through the forest with all kinds of gold and jewels, which she had obviously stolen from some poor villagers. Lieve was better at being the rich noble, and Mathilde tried to act like Lieve did, yelling and threatening to call her household knights, and to remember that she was actually supposed to let Lieve and Tims catch her, or there wouldn’t be any game. The part where they dragged her in front of Tiziana was easier, because then the whole back-and-forth was just stuff all of them remembered out of the romances they’d heard people tell.

Tiziana was good at being bandit king, especially at making up horrible crimes that whatever noble they’d caught had committed while Lieve and Tims offered suggestions (both for what Mathilde had done and what Tiziana should do to her), so it might not have mattered so much that Mathilde couldn’t really think of much to say.

Once the bandits had fully finished shaking Mathilde down for her various ill-gotten goods, Tiziana said “And you have to pay a penalty before we let you go, too.”

“But I’ve given you all my gold and horses and fine jewels,” Mathilde protested. “ _And_ I said you could have my castle.”

“Yes, but it isn’t even your castle to give, remember, you’d really stolen it from your good sister and thrown her out to wander the earth.” Tiziana waved her stick imperiously. “A penalty! You have to…um…you have to sing a song for me. A good one that I don’t know.”

Mathilde said, “Tiziana, I…I think we all know the same songs.”

Tims agreed. “It’s kind of dumb.”

“I’m your king, don’t question me.” Tiziana pointed her stick at Mathilde. “A song, or else we put you in the gibbet.”

Mathilde bit her tongue. She wasn’t sure she knew any songs Tiziana didn’t; in fact, the longer she thought about it she wasn’t sure she knew any songs at all. Lieve, fortunately, let go of her arm long enough that Mathilde could reach up and touch the coin beneath the neckline of her kirtle. She dropped her hand and took in a deep breath through her nose.

There was one, and she couldn’t say where she’d learned it, so maybe Tiziana _did_ know it, but all the same Mathilde said “I think I know one,” and started to sing.

“ _Quant define la verdour,_  
_Que muert la fuelle et la flour_  
_Et cil pré et cil boscage_  
_Font as oisiaus grant tristour,_  
_Qu’il ne font point de sejour,_  
_Lors ne me vient en corage_ …”

The others were looking at her strangely, but Mathilde had started and so she would finish.

“ _De servir en nul age_  
_Bon amour._  
_Por sa baudour_  
_Ne nuit ne jour_  
_Ne puis penser._  
_Qui m’a doné,_  
_Diex! qui m’a doné_  
_Cors pensent et cuer amer_?”

After she was done, the others were quiet for a moment, and then Tiziana said “Well, I didn’t know that one, and it was pretty good.”

“What language was that, even?” Tims asked.

“I don’t know,” Mathilde told them. “I don’t know where I learned it, either, I just…know it.”

That was a good year, with a good harvest; Gilbert and Erzsébet and Mathilde were pressed into helping gather it. Mathilde and Tiziana helped bind and carry the sheaves, watching Pier and Anna and the other small children run up and down the rows in the fields to scare away the crows. Occasionally Tiziana would brush chaff off of Mathilde’s arms or shoulders or face—Mathilde had overtopped her a long time ago and half the time Tiziana called her beanstalk now, though she wasn’t yet quite as tall as Tims—and Mathilde’s heart would skip a little.

The grown-ups in the fields sang to keep time, and Tiziana poked Mathilde in the arm and chirped “I know I’m not the bandit king anymore, but will you still sing for me?”

It was completely the wrong rhythm for anything, but Mathilde nodded and cleared her throat.

“ _Quant repaire la douçor,_  
_Que pert la fuelle et la flor_  
_Et par pré et par boscage_  
_Font li oisiau grant baudour_ …”

Tiziana hummed along while Mathilde continued.

“ _Mon cuer est en grant tristor_  
_Et moi vient en mon courage,_  
_Car j’ai mis tout mon age_  
_En fin amor_  
_Sans nul retor._  
_Et nuit et jor_  
_M’estuet penser,_  
_Qu’ai je doné,_  
_Diex! qu’ai je doné_  
_Cuer et cors por bien amer_.”

Tiziana set down the sheaf she was carrying and stretched her arms above her head. “So do you know what it means?”

Mathilde shook her head. “I think I did, once. But I must have forgotten.”

“Oh, well,” Tiziana shrugged, “maybe someone will come by who does.”

When the harvest was safely stored, Gilbert returned to the woods, and he saw, for the final time, a great light coming from the cornel cherry.

He tapped the trunk, expecting the gold which from time to time spilled from it and which he had hidden carefully beneath the cottage, but instead the bole of the tree cracked apart with a noise like lightning, and what poured forth from the broken tree was fabric. Rich furs and linens, velvets and silks, brocade and lace, fabric Gilbert had only ever heard of, in deep, luminous colors that drank in the evening light.

He reached down and let a long piece of ash-colored silk slide through his fingers, and then came to a decision. Discarding his wood, he carefully bundled up the cloth and slung it onto his back, and turned towards home, finality settling heavy in his throat.

When Gilbert reached the cottage, Mathilde was absorbed in her ranks of stones and potshards, and Erzsébet was tending the fire. Erzsébet caught Gilbert’s expression and slipped around Mathilde and out the door.

“What did you—oh,” she said. “Oh, my goodness.”

Gilbert nodded. “We can’t keep ignoring this, Erzsébet. The gold, and then this, these cloths—look at this one, I don’t even know what it _is_. But they’re for her. She has to have better than,” he waved his arm at the cottage, at the village below them.

Erzsébet pinched a length of dark green velvet between her fingers. “Mathilde was dressed in stuff like this when you brought her home,” she said eventually. “It’s…maybe it is her, her, I don’t know, station.”

“Of course it is,” hissed Gilbert. “I’ve always said—”

“I know what you’ve always said,” Erzsébet answered. “But the question was, whether we should act on it or not, and this…I’ve heard of fairy gold, but never of fairy wool.” She sighed. “Mathilde does seem happy here, though. But…then again, she’s young.”

“She is,” Gilbert agreed. “Would she still be happy here in ten years? Fifteen? Working day after day, breaking her back in a field or tending a house, freezing every winter? I mean—Bet, are _you_ happy here?”

Erzsébet laughed a little. “Well, if you’d given me the chance when I was Mathilde’s age, I’d have left in a heartbeat. You remember, I was always on about picking up a sword and running off to Alexandria or Antioch to make my fortune ransoming noble pagan knights.”

“And I bet you’re very glad you ended up with me instead,” Gilbert said, raising his eyebrows.

“Oh, hush, you’d have died of sunburn.” Erzsébet folded her arms. “Now, though…if it weren’t for Mathilde, I would stay, most likely. I don’t know what I’d _do_ in the city, and I know you don’t either. But Mathilde…she’d never go hungry. Not with the gold, not with that fabric. And that’s worth a lot.”

“It is,” Gilbert said. “And it’s how it should be.” Not for Mathilde the riches rotting in narrow room.

The next morning, Gilbert left—not up the path towards the coppices and the woods, but downhill, towards the great city that sprawled across the river that wound its way down out of the mountains. He took some of their store of gold with him, in order to buy a suitable house and have it prepared for their arrival. Mathilde didn’t know any more than that he was going to the city, a place bigger than any to which she or any of her friends had ever been, and begged him to bring her back something interesting. He promised, and kissed Erzsébet goodbye, and set off.

“What do they have in cities?” Tiziana wanted to know. Mathilde’s father had been gone most of a week by that point, and he’d said he’d be back in a week’s time, and it was just about all she could talk about.

“I’m not sure,” Mathilde admitted, stepping carefully over a fallen branch. “Houses.”

Tiziana laughed. “You think your dad’s gonna carry you a house on his back?”

“Fancy things. Roast swans. Cakes on solid gold plates.”

“Fur robes.”

“Horses.”

“Nobles. Ooh, you think your dad’s gonna bring back a prince?”

Mathilde wrinkled her nose. “What for?”

Tiziana turned to face her, smiling in the light slanting through the trees. Some of the leaves were already brown, and with the light behind them they were the color of her eyes. “What, you don’t want one?”

“What would I do with a prince?” Mathilde asked. “Ransom him?”

Tiziana laughed, and Mathilde didn’t know what was so funny. “This, silly,” she said, and craned up on her tiptoes to peck Mathilde’s cheek.

“Oh,” Mathilde said, very quietly. She didn’t know where to look. She didn’t know a lot of things. “…Do I have to do that with princes?”

Tiziana shrugged. She looked a little pink, but Mathilde thought she might be imagining it. “I don’t know, I mean, it seems to be what happens a lot with them. In the stories.”

“I don’t,” Mathilde managed to say. “I.” She felt like she was pulling on a thread at the very edge of something very, very large, and didn’t know if she wanted to. “Not me. Not with princes.”

“Well,” said Tiziana, “then I hope your dad doesn’t bring one back.” She bumped sideways into Mathilde, smiling up at her.

Later that day, Mathilde decided to dig, and Tiziana dug with her (even if that was mostly just poking at the hole with a twig while Mathilde did the work). After a little while they prised up a piece of wood shaped vaguely like a person, which Tiziana exclaimed over and immediately named Pietro.

“This’ll be Giovanna’s friend,” she declared, dusting it off. “Mathilde, can you make him a face?”

“I can. I want to make him at home, though,” Mathilde said. “To make him better.”

“Any way you make him, he’ll be great,” Tiziana said. She patted Mathilde’s arm. The sun was getting weak this late in the year, but it still spread warm across Mathilde’s back.

When she got back to the cottage, there was a cart and horse outside it, and her father was back. Mathilde ran to him, soon-to-be-Pietro clasped under one arm, and he ruffled her hair. “Hey, princess,” he said.

“What’d you bring me?”

“What, no hello?”

“Sorry!” Mathilde pulled back and straightened up. “Welcome back, father. What did you bring me?”

Her father smiled. “Well, I guess I brought you a house.”

“We’re _what_?”

“Leaving, dear.” Her mother rubbed Mathilde’s shoulder. “Pack what you want to come with you, but no furniture.”

“But…” Mathilde didn’t understand. Why would they leave? This was the world, the village and the forest; places outside of it, like the city, they existed but so far away they could have been the Moon. “I don’t want to,” she said.

“It’s for the best, Mathilde,” her mother said. “Do you want to take your collection?”

Mathilde blinked. “Will we come back tomorrow?” was all she could think to say. “Only I promised Tizi that I’d make this wood into a person for her…”

“I don’t think there’ll be time for that,” said her mother. “It’s a long journey, and we have a ways to go before nightfall.”

There was something hard and hot stuck in Mathilde’s throat and she wanted it _out_. She scooped the snail shells and bits of pottery and roots and pebbles into a bag, holding it very carefully so that as few things would break as possible.

She climbed into the cart after her parents, worrying at her lip with her teeth. Her father placed an arm around her. Mathilde knew: she was going to the city, where they had nobles and horses and ate cake off golden plates. But all she could think about was the chunk of wood she had left in the empty cottage, which would never get to be a person.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> UUUUUUGH writing kids is HARD. I just really wanted to get _some_ of this out, and it’s almost 5 AM, so. The rest of this...later. When I can. (I promise I’m working on my other stuff, too.)
> 
> Notes:  
> \--by the end of this chapter, I’d say Fem!Romano and Netherlands are both about 12, Belgium is about 10.5 or 11, and Fem!Veneziano and Fem!Germany are both 10-ish.  
> \--“riches rotting in narrow room”—Pearl, line 26.  
> \--the song: I didn’t want to wholesale steal “Warabe uta”/“Tennyo no uta,” the song used in the movie, and went with “Quant define la verdour,” a late 12th/early 13th-century French motet (performed by Sator Musicae [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F36OdVeQeNc)). Spelling inconsistencies are original, oh those wacky medievals. The translation, [by Jennifer Saltzstein](https://online.ucpress.edu/jams/article/72/1/115/109686/Songs-of-Nature-in-Medieval-Northern-France), is as follows:  
> When the verdure fades,  
> when leaf and flower die  
> and meadow and copse  
> make the birds so sorrowful  
> that they no longer remain,  
> then have I no heart  
> ever to serve  
> good love again.  
> Neither night nor day  
> can I think  
> of love’s happiness.  
> Who has given me,  
> God! who has given me  
> a pensive body and bitter heart?
> 
> When mild weather returns,  
> when leaf and flower open  
> and birds express their joy  
> in meadow and copse,  
> then my heart sorrows  
> and I begin to feel  
> that I have given all my years  
> to tender love  
> without any return.  
> And night and day  
> I have to think,  
> for I have given,  
> God! for I have given  
> my heart and body to love.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tautvilas is Lithuania, in another moment of “Hima, that’s not a real name that you’ve picked there.” He’s, again, there so briefly I didn’t bother tagging him. I guess also LietPol is briefly implied?
> 
> Consider, while you’re here, donating to the fundraiser for Jacob Blake and his family to pay for his medical bills, legal assistance, and counseling for himself and his family after Kenosha cops attempted to murder him in front of his children. [Link here.](https://www.gofundme.com/f/justiceforjacobblake) Consider also: checking to see if there’s [a branch of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee near you](https://incarceratedworkers.org/branches), and what they’re asking for at this time.

The journey lasted the better part of two days; the second day, they drove their cart onto one of the great barges that plied the lowland river. Mathilde watched the land around her change from forest and hill to rolling, open fields, watched the traffic on the road beside the river increase to a stream of farmers and merchants and friars and pilgrims. The sun was low in the west by the time their cart reached the city walls and the gate guarded by soldiers in brightly striped livery, leaning on their polearms.

Inside the city, the noise was incredible, a great clamor of voices and hooves and bells and Mathilde didn’t know what else. She heard people speaking with accents so thick she hardly recognized the language as her own, heard others speaking different tongues entirely; though neither fur robes nor nobles seemed to be in great evidence, people shoved past in a riot of color. Mathilde felt for a moment that the buildings themselves were crowding in on her, leaning over the street to block out the sky. Her mother was up front, steering the horses, so she hid her face in her father’s chest. He curled his arm around her, pulling his cloak over her, and Mathilde let herself breathe in the warm semi-darkness of that cocoon. Eventually, things became slightly quieter; her mother asked “Is it this one?” and her father said “Yeah, here,” and let go of Mathilde.

The house they’d stopped in front of was enormous: multiple floors, stone and timber. Mathilde craned up at it and realized the windows all had glass, _real_ glass. She was suddenly conscious that the dress she was wearing was the only one she owned. She held her mother’s hand as they went indoors.

Mathilde tried her best, she really did, but she just couldn’t take everything in; there were so many rooms, and things in them, and strangers who her father kept introducing her to. Some of them bowed their heads, or did a little curtsy, so Mathilde curtsied back, until one of the people gently said “No, you don’t do that.” But that was _manners_ , Mathilde thought, she was supposed to! And she’d been in the cart all day, and she was tired, and she missed Tiziana and Lieve and Tims and Clementina, and there were too many people around, and her head hurt, and she wanted to go _home_. With her free hand, she kept rubbing the coin hung from her neck, but it didn’t help, everything was wrong, it was all wrong, and she couldn’t do anything about it. She couldn’t do anything. She couldn’t move. Mathilde sat down heavily, hunching up into a kernel.

All her words were blocked up inside her, so when her father said “Bedtime, I guess,” she couldn’t say that no, she wouldn’t, because the bed was going to be all wrong too. It was; it wasn’t _her_ bed, the one she shared with her parents in their cottage. It was too big and too empty. Her father had had to carry her from the room she’d sat down in. He set her down on the edge of the bed with a grunt.

“You’re getting too big to keep acting like this,” her father said. But he sat down next to her and rested his long, bony hand on her back. Mathilde slid her coin into her mouth and clicked it against her teeth, _one-two_ , _one-two_ , _one-two_ , _one-two-three_. “I know it’s a big change, princess. But I promise, your mother and me, we’re doing what’s best for you.”

It didn’t feel best. It didn’t feel anywhere near best. Mathilde lay awake long into the night; the bed was too soft and the noises from outside were different and she was alone. Her room had windows, and though the curtains were drawn, moonlight still filtered through a gap and cast a long, bright line across the floor. Mathilde rolled onto her side, pulling the blanket with its just-off weight and texture around herself. Her eyes had long since adjusted to the darkness of the room; it wasn’t really black darkness, though, just like full night in the village wasn’t pitch-black either. There were gradations of deep, dusty blue and watery gray, tones that were only there if she strained her eyes to meet them. That, at least, wasn’t so different. Night was night.

Mathilde must have fallen asleep at some point, because she woke up when someone came into her room. Her head felt thick and gummy and she couldn’t really force out more sound than a faint “Mh?”

“Good morning, Lady Mathilde, did you sleep well?”

Mathilde tried to say _what?_ , but no noise came out when she did, so she pushed herself up to sitting. There was…a girl? Opening the curtains. Daylight flooded the room. The girl was wearing a sort of pinkish-red dress, and her light blonde hair was braided and tied up into a crown. Mathilde had no idea who she was.

Eventually, she found her tongue. “Why are you in my room?”

“To wake you up and help you get ready,” the girl said matter-of-factly.

“…Why?”

“Your parents want to see you.” The girl had finished with the curtains and stooped to open a wooden chest at the foot of the bed.

“Oh,” Mathilde murmured. She clenched her fists in the blanket. “Are they…are they mad at me, miss?”

“My name is Adelheid, my lady, you don’t have to call me miss,” the girl said. Mathilde thought she remembered that tone—this was the girl who’d told her not to curtsy to her, last night. “Why would you think they are?”

Mathilde shook her head. “They aren’t here. And they had me sleep here, instead of with them. And last night I…” _Too big to keep acting like this_. If she lived here now—in this big house with its glass windows and soft beds and more rooms than she’d ever seen, with people who called her _Lady_ —well, there was a way she was supposed to behave, wasn’t there?

“Last night, you were very tired, my lady,” Adelheid said. “Now, you’re not. If you come out of bed I can help you get dressed and comb your hair, and your parents will be very happy to see you, and you can all have breakfast. Does that sound nice, my lady?”

“I can dress myself, I’m not a baby,” Mathilde muttered, but she slid out of the tall bed anyway. She padded over to Adelheid and knelt to look into the chest. “Oh,” she gasped. It was full of bolts of rich cloth, colors—the deep russet of November leaves, the fresh green of new grass, the blues of the sky on a winter morning or on a summer night, the silvery white of birch bark—that she had only ever dreamed could be _worn_.

There were only a couple dresses already made, but Adelheid said that soon they’d have some more made, and houppelandes and cloaks and everything besides, and Mathilde chose a brown wool gown with what Adelheid said was brocade at the wrists and neck in green and gold. The chemise underneath was plain white except for the neat little blackwork patterns at its edges, but it was still maybe the softest thing Mathilde had ever worn. Adelheid combed Mathilde’s hair out quickly, not to say ungently, while she told Mathilde about herself and the city—she’d been born here, raised by her half-brother Sebastian, who was sergeant-at-arms to the prince, and had had her confirmation just that summer, in the Cathedral of Saints Anthony and Catherine, which Mathilde would surely be taken to see very soon because, she must have heard, it was very famous for the mystery plays the stonecutters’ guild organized during Advent, only if Mathilde ever met Sebastian she had to promise not to tell him that Adelheid really preferred the farces. Mathilde promised.

Adelheid fixed a filet on Mathilde’s head and pronounced her ready, and led her from the room.

For a moment, Mathilde didn’t recognize the people in front of her. Then the lady with the green damask surcoat laughed, and the white-haired lord whose houppelande was patterned with sunbursts broke into a grin, and they were her parents. Mathilde hopped forward, fears of the morning forgotten, and managed not to knock over the small table in front of them. Her father scooted to one side on the cushioned bench to give her enough room to sit, and her mother reached out and quickly fiddled with Mathilde’s filet before Mathilde could bat her hands away. There was bread and cheese and fatty smoked salmon on the little table in front of them, and Mathilde began tucking in.

“So how do you like being the Lady Mathilde von Beilschmidt?” Her father asked.

Mathilde swallowed. “Von what?”

Her father laughed his hoarse laugh. “You’re no kind of a noble without a surname, so I came up with one for us. Better making the axe than swinging it, if trees are all you’ll hit, and I think it’s got a nice ring to it.” He waved his arm. “The Lord Gilbert von Beilschmidt! And the Ladies—” he ruffled Mathilde’s hair, “Mathilde and Erzsébet—” he leaned over Mathilde to kiss her mother’s cheek, “von Beilschmidt.”

“ _You_ came up with that, did you?” Her mother grinned.

“It was my idea!”

“It was the idea you had once I’d talked you down from ‘dragon-skull’ or ‘castle of the flaming greatsword’, yes.”

“I don’t know what your problem was with either of them,” he sniffed. “They were fantastic.”

Mathilde considered. “I don’t know how I like it yet,” she said. “I’ve only had this morning. But I like this dress,” she added hastily.

“Well, why don’t you go take a look round the rest of the house when you’re done eating?” Her mother said. “It might help you make up your mind.”

In the day, and at her own pace, the house was easier to take in—the smooth wooden floors that warmed against Mathilde’s feet, the ground story with its wide hall and the floors above with their warren of rooms. She spent ages tracing the path of a vine through a tapestry with one finger, opened every door she could find, found a window with a little roundel of colored glass and watched in fascination as the light pouring through it onto her hand shifted from blue to red and back again as she waved her hand back and forth. She lay on her back in the hall, squinting up at the ceiling bosses and trying to figure out what they were. Through one door she found a broad, walled garden, mostly brown and fallow but still fragrant with sage and rosemary, and centered around a small pond.

Mathilde considered the garden carefully, and then unbuttoned her sleeves and rolled them back, and hitched her skirts up, and began looking for a suitable stick.

The dirt itself wasn’t like home; it smelled different and felt more clayey, although not so much that Mathilde couldn’t make any progress. After some very careful digging—this wasn’t the garden from home, and Mathilde didn’t know yet which parts her mother wouldn’t want dug up—Mathilde turned up a few rocks that looked promising and set them aside for future study, and then unearthed something she didn’t think she’d ever seen before. It was metal, and what she could see of it was blue-green, but it was so crusted over with dirt and deformed by age that all else she could tell was that it was sort of diamond-shaped. She managed to chip a little of the dirt off and ran her fingers over its pockmarked surface. Mathilde remembered the bag full of other treasures, and thought maybe there was a chance her mother would let her have a little part of the garden—it was much bigger than their old one, after all—to set them out in the sun. She straightened up and, hopping over some of the muddier patches of the garden, opened the door, and then Mathilde ran smack into a stranger.

She staggered, but didn’t fall over. The stranger drew back. She was skinny—no, Mathilde thought, this was a lady, ladies were _slender_ in the stories—and a few strands of dark hair escaped her neat veil. The severe, dark blue dress she wore made her eyes look almost violet. The lady arched her eyebrows at Mathilde, who blushed violently.

“There you are, Mathilde,” said her mother over the lady’s shoulder. “We were looking for you. This is the Lady Amalie von Edelstein, from the prince’s court.”

“Um, hello,” Mathilde managed. She curtsied, and then realized her skirts were still kilted up, and she was muddy all up her feet and arms, and hoped Lady Edelstein hadn’t noticed. Lady Edelstein inclined her head.

“With respect, Lady Beilschmidt, I can see she is in need of my instruction.”

That sounded like she had noticed. Mathilde blinked. “Instruction?”

“She’s agreed to give you lessons in arithmetic and literature and conduct.” Her mother slipped around Lady Edelstein’s side with a brief “pardon me” and took Mathilde’s hand. “Did you find something?”

Mathilde nodded. “I found—” she said, and then uncurled her fingers to show her mother the metal thing, but before she could say anything about it Lady Edelstein cleared her throat softly. Her mother rolled her eyes so quickly Mathilde almost missed it.

“Lady Beilschmidt, I should like to begin Lady Mathilde’s lessons now, if possible.” Lady Edelstein’s voice was cool, and her accent was the same as Adelheid’s.

Mathilde would really have preferred to talk to her mother about what she’d found, and how to clean it, and then go figure out where to put it, but she didn’t think Lady Edelstein would take well to being contradicted.

“Are _you_ going to get lessons?” Mathilde asked her mother, but neither of the women answered her.

Instead Lady Edelstein said, “Wash your hands and make yourself presentable. We shall start in your room.”

The lessons started with Lady Edelstein asking Mathilde how much she knew, but that was a hard question to answer, especially when it turned out that Lady Edelstein didn’t want to know about birds or plants but about things like reading and music and history. By the end of the week, she had set out a routine: mornings were for conduct, afternoons were for studies. Adelheid sat in as well, even though she was much farther along than Mathilde—she could already read beyond just her psalter and do sums very well.

Mathilde liked the afternoons better than the mornings. Conduct was—it was nice, she thought, to know that there were rules about how to act, but it was _exhausting_ , the way that ladies were supposed to watch themselves all the time. Ladies were not supposed to weave the way her mother weaved, the big motions and resounding _thud-clack_ of the loom; ladies could embroider, but they weren’t supposed to hunch over their work like a dog with a bone and they were to keep their feet off the seats while they did it. They were also _very much not_ supposed to run off to the garden when they got bored of lessons. But in the afternoons, even though Mathilde’s handwriting (once she got the hang of _writing_ in the first place; she had known, before, how to make her mark but not much more) drove Lady Edelstein to distraction, she caught up to Adelheid in reading very quickly, and Lady Edelstein started them both on _Von etlichen frouwen_.

Mathilde liked _Von etlichen frouwen_ , even though none of those women burst dragons apart from the inside like in the saints’ lives she’d been told. She told Lady Edelstein that, and the woman sighed and told her that while the virtue which could defeat a dragon was certainly to be aspired to, if Mathilde set her heart on dragon-slaying she would be sorely disappointed.

“You mean they’re not _real_?” Mathilde asked.

“They may be,” Lady Edelstein said curtly, “but not here and now.”

Mathilde sucked her cheek. Lady Edelstein was well-educated, she knew, but her father had told her about dragons and, at the end of the day, Mathilde knew who she believed.

Winter settled in (Mathilde did, in fact, go to see the mystery plays with her family) and eventually passed; it was the first winter Mathilde had spent entirely warm. Mathilde played string games with her embroidery thread when Lady Edelstein wasn’t looking, and made patterns on the abacus instead of calculating with it; Lady Edelstein tolerated her whacking the table or slapping her leg or stamping her foot in time with her reading, since it might benefit her when she began to learn music. People came and went in the great house: Adelheid’s half-brother, Sebastian, and the Margrave Łukasiewicz, who her father owed some sort of unclear-to-her allegiance, were the most frequent. She liked Margrave Łukasiewicz, even though she was usually kept from the room when he visited; he was friendly, and he would tell her jokes that she sometimes understood and bits of gossip that she almost never did, because she didn’t know any of the people he was talking about. Lady Edelstein told her gossip was a sin, and extremely unbecoming of young ladies. Since Margrave Łukasiewicz wasn’t a lady, and was around her father’s age, Mathilde guessed it was probably fine for him.

Lady Edelstein started teaching her music that spring, showing her how each joint on her hand and then each position of her hand on the strings of the psaltery corresponded to a note. It gave her the same feeling that learning to read had, or learning herbs: things had names, and relations to each other through those names, and she would know them. Sometimes Mathilde lay on her bed, flexing and curling her fingers, humming the notes that went along with them.

“Don’t hunch,” Lady Edelstein told her, of the psaltery. “When you play music, you are playing to be seen as much as heard. The grace of your posture will enter into your hands, and make the music more beautiful. Now, put your shoulders back, like _so_ —but bow your head. There is pride, and there is being over-proud.”

Mathilde missed the village still sometimes, when she thought of it—it was like a new tooth growing in, becoming more familiar to the rest of her mouth, but still a jolt when she returned her tongue to the gap. She had stopped asking fairly quickly when it was that they’d go back, even just to visit. Her parents were both busy with the sort of things that came with being noble, the things that Lady Edelstein was meant to prepare her and Adelheid for. Still, her mother worked in the garden, and did some of her own weaving even though they could buy cloth in the market, and her father, full of unspent energy that Mathilde could almost see jumping inside him, would sometimes shoo servants out of a room and finish cleaning it himself, and often as not went out riding.

The beehive in the garden was empty, and that spring her parents moved a swarm in, very carefully, and her mother let Mathilde help sing the charms to settle them when they woke. Mathilde repeated them after her, _sit tight, stay still, my little bees, as the blessed Mary commands you_ , watching them sluggishly shake off the effects of the smoke they’d been treated with. _You shall not fly to the woods, nor slip my grasp, nor escape at all, but sit very still and do God’s will_. She followed along to the tune on her hand, tapping each joint. By the summer, the garden was in full and fragrant growth, thick with the drone of the bees; one of the trees in it was a pear tree, and sometimes Lady Edelstein would give Mathilde and Adelheid their lessons underneath it. Mathilde kept some of the things she had dug up over the years on the windowsill in her bedroom, but more of them outside, arranged on one of the retaining walls, and would slip a snail shell or pebble into her hands to roll in her palm during the lessons.

So the year passed. That fall, Mathilde was given a book of hours of her own, and looking at it, she realized that a year _had_ passed, that it was almost winter again. She wondered who was cutting wood for the village now—maybe one of the Jacobs? The question, she knew, was important, but it didn’t feel real, exactly. If she went back, Mathilde thought, it would have to have changed a little, after a whole year gone, but she couldn’t imagine it.

Winter came again: Christmas service at the cathedral, and a New Year’s party at Margrave Łukasiewicz’s city house, where she danced a little with her father and then, head aching from the noise and the mulled wine, retreated to a corner of the hall under the sympathetic eye of the margrave’s companion Tautvilas, who held some court office that she had forgotten. That St. Margaret’s day, she knew, her parents would consider it her twelfth birthday; soon enough she would not only be a young lady but a young _woman_ , and for a young lady of any age taking the coin on its string from her sleeve, where she usually kept it now, and fiddling with it was childish and unbecoming. She wound and unwound the string around her fingers, pressed the edge of the coin into her palm. In the light of the hall the worn-down pattern on its surface reminded her of the cathedral steps, smoothed by centuries of feet. She wondered who had held it when it was minted, before it went into the warm, dark grasp of the earth, and who would hold it after her.

That spring, the city was packed with pilgrims for Easter. Mathilde’s mother and Lady Edelstein took Mathilde and Adelheid to the upper market, held in a crook of the old city walls, in the mule-cart they used for these trips. Together, the ladies made a formidable bartering team, and sometimes Mathilde had to cover her mouth to keep from laughing. Despite a persistent chilly drizzle, the market was packed, and Mathilde followed close behind her mother as she moved from stall to stall, hoods pulled over their heads. She didn’t have much in her own purse, but she had enough that as they were all preparing to go back to the house she bought a few fruit rissoles to share with Adelheid.

She nibbled the rissole as the cart trundled back up the street, aware of Lady Edelstein’s opinions on the manner of polite eating. Foot traffic ebbed and flowed around the cart, and Mathilde turned when she heard shouting rise behind them.

She couldn’t quite see what was going on, there were too many people in the way, but she heard “ _Stop! Hey! Come back here!_ ” and a couple outraged voices to the tune of “ _Watch where you’re going!_ ”, and by then Mathilde was fully watching with some interest, and then the apparent target of the shouting bulled through a couple of people into a gap in the crowd and it—it was Tiziana, there was no mistaking her, maybe a little taller and thinner, but her, what was she doing _here_? There was still shouting, but it was immaterial, insubstantial, as if the village had suddenly become the real place and the city not.

Mathilde shook herself from her stupor and, leaning over the back of the cart, shouted “Tiziana!” She wasn’t sure what was next. That didn’t matter, what was next.

Tiziana’s head snapped up. She was holding a squawking, struggling chicken to her chest. She frowned, and mouthed _Mathilde?_ , and then startled forward at the renewed shouts behind her, and Mathilde heard “ _Thief!_ ” and that didn’t matter because Tiziana was there, was looking, was—was skittering sideways, away from her pursuer, nearly losing her grip on the chicken.

Mathilde yelled her name again. She was vaguely aware that Lady Edelstein was saying something to her, and there was a hand on her shoulder. That didn’t matter. What mattered was, if that wasn’t Tiziana’s chicken, Mathilde could buy it, or ask her mother to buy it, and then Tiziana would—well, would _be there_ , and for a third time Mathilde yelled “Tiziana!” and meant _come here!_

Maybe Tiziana heard. Mathilde didn’t know. She started to move forwards again, towards the cart, but the gap in the crowd had started to close again and she couldn’t push her way through. Mathilde saw her turn, trapped, at bay, and cried out in dismay and barely heard herself do it. Lady Edelstein’s hand finally pressed her back into her seat. Mathilde kept her eyes fixed on the spot, willing Tiziana to break free as easily as she’d dodged anyone in the village, but saw nothing, and any noise was swallowed up by the city, as it became real again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (me, in the background, beating my brain with a two-by-four as it shrieks at me that I have to make this more historically accurate, HOW did Gilbert get his family ennobled, money isn’t enough to do that! and I yell that it’s a fairy tale and fantasy and fanfiction and I’m calling my mom)
> 
> \--Boy it’s weird writing Liech as older than non-micronation characters. I was going to make her younger than Mathilde, and then I realized it’d be _real_ fuckin’ weird to have an 8-year-old lady’s maid. It was fairly common in northern Europe for children in their early teens to be sent off to work in someone else’s house, though this didn’t mean all contact with their family ceased. The practice horrified southern Europeans, who were all like, “don’t these people love their children??”  
> \--This is a generalization, but up until the 1800s, communal sleeping was basically SOP lower down the class scale; beds are expensive and take up space, so families would share. If you were a solo traveler, you’d usually be expected to share a bed in an inn with a complete stranger (or, if you were stopping somewhere smaller, the bed of whoever’s house you stayed at).  
> \--The title “prince” from here on out doesn’t mean “son of king/emperor”; whereas German makes a distinction between _Prinz_ (male descendant of a sovereign) and _Fürst_ (nobleman who was the sovereign ruler of a chunk of the Holy Roman Empire but was outranked by kings and emperors, OR nobleman who outranked a count but was subordinate to a duke, OR just a general term for a minor monarch), English doesn’t and just calls them all princes. I probably didn’t do a great job of explaining what a _Fürst_ is, partially because I don’t know a whole lot about it and can’t speak German anyway and partially because the HRE’s legal system was basically spaghetti. A margrave ( _Markgraf_ ) is more or less a fancy count.  
> \--A mystery play is an adaptation of Biblical narrative into vernacular drama, usually staged by a guild. Contrary to what Adelheid implies, there was often not as big a distinction between a mystery play and a farce as various no-fun-allowed types would have liked (for instance: the Wakefield Second Shepherds’ Pageant, which is a burlesque on the Nativity, or the various Cain and Abel plays where Cain and his servant boy have a whole comedy routine, or the use of Noah’s wife and her friends as comic relief).  
> \--Surnames are kind of a broad topic, because during this time period IRL they were kind of in the process of becoming more widespread, but _in general_ during this time period if you were a noble you got to have one with what’s called a ‘nobiliary particle’, like _von_ or _de_ , which all more or less mean ‘from/of’. Beilschmidt literally means ‘axe-smith’, and it’s a bit of an odd one for nobility, but whatever.  
> \-- _Von etlichen frouwen_ is the German title of _De mulieribus claris_ , a collection of biographies of famous mythological and historical women compiled by Giovanni Boccaccio, and one of the most popular works of the later Middle Ages. The first German translation I know of was done in the 1470s, so we’re just pretending this one came earlier. Unlike St. Margaret, none of the women Boccaccio covers were eaten by dragons which they exploded from the inside. (Several female saints are supposed to have done this and I always think of Ron Perlman in Pacific Rim.)  
> \--Amalie teaches Mathilde using the Guidonian Hand method, which is a mnemonic for the hexachord system, which was the basis for most medieval musical instruction. I know next to nothing about music theory and can’t really say more than that. A psaltery is more or less a lap-harp; meanwhile, a psalter is a book containing the Psalms as well as other devotional aids such as liturgical calendars, and cousin to a book of hours.  
> \--The [Lorsch Bee Blessing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorsch_Bee_Blessing) is 9th-century but I like it so I’m putting it in here.  
> \--Fruit rissoles are in The Forme of Cury, they sound kind of gross to me but I don’t like raisins or cooked fruit anyway.
> 
> I’m…a little shrug emoji about this chapter, but again I wanted to write something and this is less research than _The Face of God_ and _an open grave_ needs me to go and figure out an actual plot structure before I continue it. You know what else needs continuing? The dissertation I’m supposed to be writing right now, God help me. If I post nothing again until November, that’s why. Grad school: not even once.


End file.
